Photoreactions are a pain in the nuts quite often because you have to stick them next to light sources that often heat the sample up to a billion degrees. This, of course, isn't always wanted, which means you're either going to have to cool your sample or fit a reflux condenser on it. [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Not hot for photochemistry", url: "http://www.thechemblog.com/?p=864" });...

Rajeev S. Muthyala may or may not be trying to fuck with us in this Org Lett ASAP (DOI: 10.1021/ol801204s), but I certainly felt fucked with.  See, part of what I like to do here is not only point out the well written, well thought out science but also the bull shit and this article [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "wtf.", url: "http://www.thechemblog.com/?p=856" });...

A continuation from The great rotaxan debate part one. Released in honor of the ISMSC conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. See CBC for live blogging. 2.1 A rotaxane is a rotaxane unless it's a pseudorotaxane, then it's just a kinetically stable rotaxane: The differences in opinions from the world's experts are reasonably similar, to be [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "The great rotaxane debate part tw...

Freakonomics, a book cowritten by the U Chicago economist Steve Levitt, is a treatise on the economics of ethics. I am in the school of belief that morality and ethics are separate but not mutually exclusive sets of… er…. lifestyle choices. Ethics, I think, can be explained in economic terms where as morality [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Ethics in check and on the cheap", url: "http://www....

But what constitutes one of those Venial sins of science? Perhaps hearing or reading unpublished data in an article you're peer reviewing, which is related to your own work, and subsequently coming up with plans for your own research based off these ideas as soon as the original author publishes might be one such venial [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "The Venial sins of science", url: "http://www...